Bannon on China

In a Washington Post Op-Ed yesterday, Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon made the case for a continued aggressive stance with China, stating that we have been in a prolonged trade war for years. Tariffs and working toward a strong, enforceable deal are the only paths to US success, whereas a weak deal that allows continued Chinese tech and intellectual property theft (and lacks of oversight provisions) would benefit China.

Bannon disagrees that a failure to reach a deal would result in a market crash: “But it is a decidedly false narrative that any failure to reach a deal will lead to a market meltdown and economic implosion. In fact, there is no better argument for Trump keeping his bold tariffs on China than the latest report that the U.S. economy grew at an annualized rate of 3.2 percent in the first quarter.”

Today’s Data

The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), which provides a deeper look into the March 2019 non-farm payrolls number of 189K, came in at 7.488 million, higher than the Bloomberg Consensus of 7.35 million. The 7.087 million February figure was revised up to 7.142 million.

Of note, Fed Vice Chair Clarida repeated the transitory message on inflation about as many times as Powell did in the FOMC presser, and Clarida specifically mentioned “trimmed mean inflation,” which was the same metric Powell mentioned last week.

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